A Christmas Carol (1948) - Classics Illustrated No. 53

Classics Illustrated No. 53: A Christmas Carol (1948)
Adaptation: George D. Lipscomb
Illustrations: Henry Kiefer

So, Disney's 2009 motion capture animated version was kind of creepily realistic.

The style reminded me of those old "Classics Illustrated" comic books, you know the ones kids would use to write their book reports instead of reading the books. They also had an art style that was going for realistic, but just seemed a bit off.

The series started in 1941 with an adaptation of "The Three Musketeers," which is exactly what Beaver Cleaver should have used for his book report instead of the musical comedy Ritz Brothers movie version. But Mrs. Rayburn probably would've sniffed that out as well.

Anyway, for our purposes, issue number 53 of "Classics Illustrated" came out in late 1948 and it was, indeed, a comic book version of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens!

So, how does this thing hold up now and how does it compare with the original book? Does it leave anything out or add anything different? Could you write a book report from it and get away with it?

You can read it by following this link and see for yourself...

Since the original work is a novella, the adapters are able to use much more of the source material than in many of the other adaptations, which attempt to cram huge works into 50 or fewer pages.

About the only notable thing that's omitted is that the Ghost of Christmas Present does not have Ignorance and Want with him.

A smaller detail that's omitted is the caroler singing outside Scrooge's office. Not a big thing, but what makes it odd is that Scrooge references the incident when he see his younger, lonely self in the past.

Similarly, Scrooge does not make his "decrease the surplus population" statement to the charity solicitors. But, the Ghost of Christmas Present ostensibly repeats those words to Scrooge (although without the "surplus" but Scrooge didn't say any of it anyway). Oops! So much for tight editing!

Although the plot line is virtually identical to the book, the dialogue is changed a bit here and there. I think partially to condense it for the sake of panel space, but also to make it a bit more understandable to the youth of the day.

That being said, the author does give us a few definitions, such as the helpful note that gruel is boiled cereal! They could have said it was like Ralston Purina and 1948 kids would've been all set!

Perhaps the most interesting feature is not so much the actual artwork, but the ideas behind it. Since this was published in 1948, really the only visual reference point besides earlier illustrations would have been the MGM movie from 10 years prior.

The only thing that seems similar to me between the two that's not straight out of the book, however, is the depiction of the Ghost of Christmas Past. It looks more like a young woman with long, blonde hair than anything else, which is how MGM's ghost was depicted and it's also dressed similarly to Ann Rutherford's ghost from 1938. This depiction is not how the ghost is described in the book, but the other ghosts do follow the book's description, as do most adaptations.

The artwork itself is very inconsistent, with the characters looking different from panel to panel, including the Ghost of Christmas Past, which I don't think is intentional.

It's interesting to see the images from the three Christmas sequences as ghostly figures, with Scrooge and the ghosts being solid, rather than the other way around. This is not consistent from panel to panel either, and I'm not sure what the intent was, as I see no rhyme or reason to it.

Most intriguing of all, I think, is that they give Bob Cratchit a little more character development that differs from the book. Here, he's actually a resentful employee! He's not exactly, the humble, faithful Bob that I usually think of!

 Is Scrooge right? Is he really a young scallywag?

So, some interesting little remarks added in!

Ultimately we're left with a straightforward adaptation of the book, without a lot of embellishment, rendered in an inconsistent style.

But, transport yourself back to 1948 and this might have been your best shot at a visualization of the story in a format you could access at your leisure!

And you could totally have used this to write a book report!